You know that saying about how a guy can walk into a bar, ask 100 girls to go out with him (to put it nicely :), and eventually – by playing the numbers game – one will say yes?
Recruiting isn’t too different. Even sleazy recruiters get lucky.
I’ve seen really horrible recruiters make great careers for themselves by spamming potential candidates. They’ll trawl job boards, blogs, and personal websites for anything resembling a resume, an email address, and terms like C++ or C# … and let their email blasters do the rest of the work. Besides the demonstrated poor business ethics and brand damage that go along with this practice, these recruiters can actually find great success. Recruiting is often a numbers game, and the recruiter who spams 1000 candidates a day can typically “win” out versus the one who selectively contacts 10 per day. Sad, but very true.
Luckily, most recruiters aren’t spammers, but they are out there … and DonXML offers some good advice to combat “resume trawling”:
- Register to the job search site with a new (unique for this site) email address. This email address should not be used for anything other than for a job search on this site.
- Put only this email address in your resume (removing all contact info, except maybe the state and or region you live in, just like my original tip).
- At the top of the resume, just after the email address, place something similar to this:
Position Information
Do not try to contact me via the website. Any emails sent thru the contact form will be sent to a dummy email account that I don’t read. Instead, go to my site and contact me via my contact me page (it is listed on the main page). When you do contact me, put the Code Word in the subject field. Hopefully, you will also spend some time browsing the site, which should also help you get a better idea of my background and skills.
As one of his readers says, “It's kinda like a "resume Captcha’.”
I always recommend that jobseekers create an email address just for their job search efforts in order to keep the recruiter spam out their real inboxes - but Don takes this approach one step further, and I like it. I’d love to hear from people who have tried an approach like this. How do you combat recruiter spam coming at you? And how do you ensure your company's recruiter isn't the one doing the spamming?
gretchen